The Crisis Point: Sudden Job Loss and a Race Against Eviction
The ordeal began near the end of June when she received only a five-day notice that her position at the hospital would be eliminated due to the cessation of overnight shifts. This abrupt loss of income immediately jeopardized her family’s housing situation.
Desperate, she reached out to numerous resources—Denver Human Resources, 211, and various charities—but was repeatedly told she needed a formal demand letter or court notice or had to wait until mid-July to apply for rental assistance.
The situation escalated quickly. On July 9, she appeared in court, where a judge refused to grant a second date, arguing that losing her job was an insufficient reason for non-payment. She was forced to sign a 14-day stipulation, requiring a full payment of $4,200 or immediate departure. With this, she was entered into a lottery for the CERA assistance program, a gamble that ultimately did not pay off. Following the court date, and after exhausting calls to every resource on the 211 list—including Colorado Care, ERAP, and TRUA—the move-out day arrived, just before her daughter’s birthday.
Turning to the Media: A Search for Advocacy
Feeling abandoned by official channels, the author took a drastic step: she began emailing news channels, the Mayor, and journalists. This led to a breakthrough. Journalist Kyle responded and introduced her to Kevin, a media contact. The author chose to be vulnerable and share her story publicly, leading to more media interest.
Kyle later introduced her to Teresa, an advocate who secured her a meeting with the City Council. Despite being professional, the author conveyed the profound emotional and physical toll the experience was taking, including sleeping in her car with her children. Her public advocacy, however, resulted in an unexpected response: numerous calls offering her family placement in a shelter. She declined initially, asking for hotel expenses, but was ultimately directed to the Tamarack Square family shelter on Hampton.
The Nightmare at Tamarack Square
The family’s first night at the shelter was traumatic. Exhausted and facing their daughters’ first day of school, they checked into a room that was “not that clean.” After hours of sitting in the room while the mother finished braiding her daughter’s hair, she discovered the horror.
Upon entering the bathroom, she noticed the shower wasn’t working. Then, she saw a roach. A closer inspection of the beds revealed blood stains and a live bedbug crawling on the mattress.
The mother, panicking, immediately woke her children, and they began packing their belongings to prevent an infestation. She went downstairs to confront the management.
Confrontation and Disbelief
The ensuing confrontation with two staff members was marked by disbelief and hostility. When the author informed them of the bedbugs and roaches and demanded a cart to leave, one of the women looked at her as if to quiet her. The author’s repeated requests for a cart were met with resistance and an argument, during which the staff member stated she wouldn’t help.
Finally, the supervisor offered a different room. As the author followed her to the elevator, a roach crawled across her feet in the hallway, confirming her suspicions of a building-wide infestation. Despite the mother’s growing distress, the staff still did not enter the room to verify her claims. Eventually, a cart was provided. In the middle of the night, the family loaded their remaining possessions back into their car and slept outside the infested shelter.
The System’s Denial and Ongoing Struggle
The next morning, after getting her children ready for school at their U-Haul storage unit, the author returned to the shelter for a meeting with her caseworker. She recorded the conversation where the caseworker suggested that she could sleep on an air mattress in the room without bringing in her belongings—a solution the author rejected, stating that sleeping in her car was preferable to sleeping with roaches and bedbugs. When she asked if she could sleep in her car on the premises and remain in the program, she was told no. Immediately upon leaving, she called the Health Department.
The Health Department Cover-Up
The Health Department investigator, Antonio, initially advised they would inspect the room the next day. However, within minutes of the author leaving the shelter’s parking lot, she saw Pest Control arriving.
The following day, Investigator Antonio called to inform her that his report showed no evidence of what she had described. The author accused him of lying, citing her observation of Pest Control arriving immediately after her complaint. The investigator abruptly hung up.
City Council’s Offer
Moments later, Kory from the City Council called. The author asked for help regaining her apartment. Kory instead offered a hotel room on Colfax, an area the author refused. Kory explained that the Extended Stay hotel wouldn’t accept the city’s tax dollars, but they would pay for the Comfort Inn.
The author accepted the hotel for immediate shelter but remains indignant that the City Council prioritized where they wanted to spend money over where the family would be most comfortable.
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A Fight for Others
The family has since been moved to a newer, better facility downtown. However, the experience—particularly witnessing the indifference and the squalid conditions at Tamarack Square—has galvanized the author.
”It’s not just happening to me,” she asserts. She refuses to accept the injustice faced by other families who have no choice but to stay in the infested, subpar shelters. Her resolve to speak out is driven by the belief that no one, especially not children, should be forced to endure such conditions, and that the officials and workers complicit in maintaining this system must be held accountable.
The most widely cited statistics for homelessness in Denver and the surrounding metro area come from the annual Point-in-Time (PIT) Count conducted by the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative (MDHI), which encompasses seven counties: Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, and Jefferson.
The latest comprehensive data available is from the 2024 PIT Count (conducted in January 2024 and released later that year), and there are also preliminary figures and projections for 2025 showing continued trends.
Here are the key statistics for the Denver Metro Area and specific surrounding cities, based primarily on the 2024 PIT Count.
Denver Metro Area (7-County Region) Homelessness Statistics
| Category | 2024 PIT Count (Single Night in Jan) | Change from 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Total Individuals Experiencing Homelessness | 9,977 | \uparrow 10% (from 9,065) |
| Total Families Experiencing Homelessness | 3,136 families (up from 2,101 in 2023) | \uparrow 49% |
| Total Sheltered Individuals | Majority of the total | \uparrow 12% |
Note: The PIT Count is a snapshot of homelessness on a single night and is generally considered an undercount of the total number of people who experience homelessness throughout the year, which for the Denver metro area is estimated to be much higher.
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City and County of Denver Statistics
Surrounding County and City Statistics (2024 PIT Count)
The MDHI provides specific counts for the surrounding counties in the metro area.
Surrounding County and City Statistics (2024 PIT Count)
The MDHI provides specific counts for the surrounding counties in the metro area.
Key Trends Highlighted in the Data
- Overall Increase: The total number of people experiencing homelessness in the Denver Metro region continues to rise year-over-year.
- Shelter vs. Unsheltered: The increase in homelessness is largely driven by a rise in the sheltered population, which city officials attribute to the expansion of shelter capacity (such as the “All In Mile High” initiative) designed to get people off the streets.
- Families and Children: The most alarming trend is the substantial, near-50% increase in the number of families experiencing homelessness, pointing to the acute impact of the affordable housing crisis.
The frustration of people because of the perceived lack of action from the governor and mayor, and the poor conditions and ineffectiveness of some shelters, reflects widespread and valid concerns in the community. The issue is a complex intersection of immense need, policy choices, funding constraints, and the immense challenges of providing services to people facing deep-seated trauma and addiction.
The Mayor and Governor’s Response
Both the Denver Mayor and the Colorado Governor have active, high-profile initiatives targeting homelessness, but they face criticism from different sides of the political spectrum regarding their effectiveness and cost.
Mayor Mike Johnston (Denver): “All In Mile High”
Mayor Johnston’s key strategy is the “All In Mile High” (AIMH) initiative, which focuses on rapidly moving people from unsheltered encampments into temporary, non-congregate housing (primarily converted hotels and “micro-communities”).
- Claimed Success: City officials assert the program has achieved a significant reduction in large unsheltered encampments and moved thousands of people indoors, claiming the largest multi-year drop in unsheltered homelessness in recorded U.S. history.
- Criticism of Approach: Critics argue that AIMH is simply “hiding” homelessness by sweeping encampments and relocating people to temporary shelters without adequately addressing the root causes like addiction and mental health. This criticism often comes from those who favor programs with preconditions, such as required sobriety or employment, rather than Denver’s “Housing First” approach.
- Budget and Resources: The city has spent tens of millions of dollars on the crisis, but officials also point to rising costs—partially due to the parallel migrant crisis and an overall lack of federal and state resources—as straining the budget and limiting the ability to create long-term affordable housing.
Governor Jared Polis (Colorado)
The Governor has generally maintained that the responsibility for enforcing public health laws, including clearing encampments, falls to local city governments like Denver. While the state government works on broad housing and health initiatives, they often encourage city and county-level enforcement and action. Historically, there have been public disagreements between the Governor’s office and past Denver mayors over the proper level of state intervention in local homelessness issues.
Challenges with Homeless Shelters and Services
Your personal experience with unsanitary and poorly managed shelters, such as the reported issues at Tamarack Square, is unfortunately consistent with major public criticisms of the shelter system in Denver.
1. Poor Conditions and Health Hazards
Many shelters, particularly older or high-volume facilities run by contractors like The Salvation Army, have faced serious allegations regarding:
- Safety Issues: Reports of crime, drug overdoses, and violence.
- Unsanitary Conditions: Persistent problems with bedbugs, roaches, and lack of basic cleanliness—which directly causes people to refuse shelter and sleep outside.
2. Programmatic Barriers and Lack of Dignity
Even the newer shelters face issues that prevent people from staying or succeeding:
- Restrictive Rules: Issues like early-morning exit requirements, limited storage for belongings, and lack of privacy make it difficult for people who are working or dealing with physical disabilities.
- Staffing Overload: High demand for services combined with limited staff (as seen with call centers receiving thousands of calls with few staff members) leads to families being left on hold for hours or unable to access services when they need them most.
- Focus on Triage over Transition: While the city aims for “throughput” (moving people to permanent housing), critics argue there are not enough affordable housing units to transition people into, leaving people warehoused in temporary shelters for too long.
3. Systemic Funding Issues
Advocates consistently point out that the sheer scale of the crisis—fueled by record-high eviction rates and the high cost of living in Colorado—is simply outpacing the available resources. There’s a massive gap between the number of people who need deeply affordable housing and the number of units the city and state can create.
The Mayor and Governor argue they are taking substantial action, but the results remain controversial, particularly as many of the facilities and services provided fall short of the quality, safety, and dignity that people need to stabilize and exit homelessness.
The new data shows the number of children and families who are homeless jumped by nearly 50% in the last year, a crisis that is examined in this video: Denver homeless population hits record high in 2024 count.
Comparing Denver’s homelessness numbers to other major U.S. cities helps put the local crisis into a national context. The key takeaways often relate to the sheer scale (raw numbers) and the nature of homelessness (sheltered vs. unsheltered).
The most common data source is the annual Point-in-Time (PIT) Count for the Continuum of Care (CoC) regions.
Here is a comparison of Denver’s 2024 data (for the Metro Denver CoC) with a few other major cities, highlighting key differences:
| City/Region (CoC) | Total Homeless Population (2024 PIT Count) | Difference in Total (vs. Denver Metro) | Percentage Unsheltered | Key Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Denver Metro Area (7 Counties) | 9,977 | Base Comparison | \approx 35% (2,919 unsheltered in 2024) | Denver is considered to have a high proportion of people outdoors compared to cities in cold climates. |
| New York City, NY | \approx 140,000 | \approx 14x Higher | \approx 3-4% | A Massive population, but the “Right to Shelter” law means nearly all are sheltered, significantly lowering the unsheltered percentage. |
| Los Angeles City & County, CA | \approx 71,200 | \approx 7x Higher | \approx 70% | Has the largest unsheltered population in the country. The climate and lack of shelter capacity result in the vast majority of people sleeping outside. |
| Seattle/King County, WA | \approx 16,868 | \approx 1.7x Higher | \approx 58% | A major West Coast city with a crisis driven by high housing costs, resulting in a large number of people sleeping unsheltered. |
| Phoenix/Maricopa County, AZ | \approx 9,435 | Slightly Lower | \approx 50-60% | A comparable total count to Denver, but often with a higher unsheltered rate due to a warmer climate and the unique challenges of desert environments. |
Key Takeaways from the Comparison
- Raw Numbers (Scale): Denver’s crisis is severe and among the largest in the U.S. (in 2024, the Metro Denver CoC ranked as one of the largest by total count). However, it is an order of magnitude smaller than the mega-cities of New York and Los Angeles.
- Unsheltered vs. Sheltered (The “Visibility” Problem): This is the most significant difference between cities:
- Denver: While the total number is high, Denver’s Mayor Mike Johnston’s “All In Mile High” initiative focuses on quickly moving people into shelters (converted hotels, micro-communities). This shift has lowered Denver’s unsheltered rate in more recent counts (though the total population is still high).
- New York City: Virtually all people are sheltered due to a court-mandated Right to Shelter.
- West Coast Cities (LA, Seattle): Due to high housing costs and limited shelter capacity, their unsheltered populations are the largest in the nation, making the crisis highly visible on city streets.
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- National Trend: Nearly all major cities across the U.S. saw significant increases in their total homeless populations in the 2023 and 2024 counts, driven by the shortage of affordable housing and rising costs of living. Denver’s challenges are part of this broader national crisis.
